While most forms of digital marketing offer some value to dealers, the one constant has – and always will be – the better your inventory merchandising, the higher your sales.

In the digital world, your merchandising takes place on your VDP Pages, making your VDP Pages one of (if not “the”) most valuable pieces of digital real estate that you have today.  The goal of the merchandising on your VDP Pages is to get a consumer emotionally attached to the vehicle, to take “mental ownership.” Or, at a minimum, to generate enough interest that the shopper will come to your store and take a test drive.  If you can’t obtain one of these goals, then you hope that your presentation of the vehicle at least had a large enough impact on the shopper that they will remember one of your vehicles as they continue their shopping and bounce from site to site. 

This is why you invest the time and/or money into your current digital marketing strategy:  You have a website that gets good traffic and that has good flow to the Vehicle Details Pages (VDPs); pay 3^rd parties for VDPs on their sites; have high quality photos for each vehicle on its VDP; use a good quality vehicle description for each vehicle; and even have all kinds of “conversion widgets” and such on your VDP Pages. You know how important your VDP Pages are. And you currently invest a lot of time and money into your efforts to have the “best” presentation of your vehicles as possible on those VDPs. 

Now, up to this point, I haven’t told you anything that you don’t already know. But let’s consider this:   

• People retain 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and an amazing 70% of what they see & hear combined.  This means that a shopper is at least 40% more likely to form an emotional attachment and remember “your” inventory if they are able to watch videos of the vehicles on your VDPs. 

• More than 85% of today’s consumer’s say that they prefer product video over photos and a text based product description.  Shoppers are significantly more likely to spend a greater amount of time on your VDPs -- and more likely to return to YOUR website at a future time -- if they know that they can receive their content the in the form in which they desire to receive it…video. 

• Live Inventory Videos average 600% more engagement than stitched photo videos.  This means that having a stitched photo video is better than not having a video at all; however, you will receive a significant boost in engagement if you are utilizing live inventory videos.  This IS the best presentation of your vehicles (merchandising) possible for your VDPs. 

The actual process of shooting a live inventory video only takes around 2 to 5 minutes per vehicle.  Yes, it may take you a little longer in the beginning, when you first start shooting the videos, and before you are comfortable with the process.  But, after you’ve shot a few, you should easily be able to get your process down to the 2 to 5 minute range.  The actual process of shooting a live video is hardly an overwhelming investment of time, especially when considering the engagement and conversion benefits.

What DOES take time is everything else.  You have to manually upload the video to a “host” (or multiple hosts), rename every file as you upload it, and then manually process the video URL to each location that you would like for the video to play.  I’m sure there are plenty of you reading this who remember the days that this same “time consuming” process was at one time true for your photos.  Shooting the photos was the easy part, but to get your photos to all of the various digital touch-points, you had to manually rename them and upload them touch-point by touch-point.  Instead, many dealerships would either choose to not keep their photos current on the various digital touch-points, to outsource the photo process to a 3^rd party, or would hire an in-house staff to do nothing but shoot and upload photos all day.  As time progressed, and as dealerships started to realize how important the photos were to the merchandising process, more and more started investing in technology that made the upload and distribution process fast and easy.  They still had to have someone shoot their photos, but that’s all they had to do and technology took care of the rest. 

The great news is that this same technology now exists for your videos.  All someone has to do is shoot the video (2 to 5 minutes) and technology will automatically name, upload, and distribute the videos for you (and often in real-time).  In fact, you can even have your photographer shoot the video for you at the same time they are shooting their photos.  And if you aren’t comfortable with your photographer talking about the vehicles while shooting the videos, then technology can even automatically add the audio layer to the video as it is being automatically uploaded.  And you could even have one of your Sales or BDC Team members (from the comfort of their own office) re-record the audio layer of the video and instantly replace the automated audio layer on all of the digital touch-points (in real-time), if so desired.  No more wind or highway noises, no airplanes flying overhead, and no worrying about the weather. 

Even greater news is that these same videos can then also be utilized by your sales team and/or BDC team for personalized walkaround videos for lead responses. Instead of the time consuming, over and over process of shooting one video that would be seen by one person, of checking out the keys, finding the vehicle on the lot (in the heat, cold, rain, snow), pulling the vehicle out of the line, shooting the video, parking the vehicle, walking back inside, checking in the keys, uploading the video to a “host”, grabbing the URL and sending the video URL out in an email…the sales or BDC team member can now simply pull up the existing video (being used on the VDPs), re-record a personalized message as the audio, add background music (if desired), click save, and email out…all in less time than it takes to check out  the keys and find the vehicle on the lot. 

We used to find all kinds of excuses for why we didn’t keep our VDPs (across all of the digital touch-points) updated each day with 25, 35, 55+ photos. Excuses ranged from “it’s too much work” to “it costs too much money (if outsourced).” And I’m sure you can find plenty of new excuses as to why you aren’t shooting live videos for your VDPs and using walkaround videos for your lead responses…but the fact is that “it’s too much work,” is no longer a valid excuse, especially when you consider the impact that it will have on your sales.